An Information Session will be held on Thursday, February 7 at 4 p.m. in 101 Chapman Hall. The Application is available on Clark Honors College Canvas, under "Resources & Opportunities…” Applications will be due by 5:00 p.m. Friday, February 15. Interviews will be held during Week 7, and students will be notified of their standing by end of Week 8.

This class will be held on Tuesdays, 6:00-8:50 p.m., inside the Oregon State Correctional Institution (OSCI) in Salem; transportation will be provided. We'll leave campus sharply at 4:00 p.m. and return by 10:30 p.m. The first day of class will be held on Monday, April 1, 6:00-8:20 p.m., in 201 Chapman Hall.

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) is one of the greatest and most influential masters of the novel. The Russian literary classics of the nineteenth century, including the novels of Tolstoy, made a profound impression on Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), perhaps the greatest modern philosopher of the centrality of ethical obligation to what it means to be human. We will carefully read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, paying special attention to what the novel has to say about ethics understood in Levinas’s sense: my inescapable responsibility for a unique and irreplaceable other. We will read Ethics and Infinity, a reasonably accessible and brief series of interviews with Levinas, and we will look for connections between Tolstoy’s fiction and Levinas’s thought. We will consider how Anna’s otherness is sacrificed, in Tolstoy’s novel, to a notion of religion that is divorced from ethics, a notion of religion that Emmanuel Levinas labels as “primitive”: “Everything that cannot be reduced to an interhuman relation,” Levinas writes in Totality and Infinity (79), "represents not the superior, but rather the forever primitive, form of religion.” Anna's husband Karenin’s dogmatic – and, perhaps paradoxically, at the same time “primitive” - understanding of Christianity makes it impossible for him to hear Anna’s voice, to see her face, to register her otherness, her alterity. Tolstoy’s critique of conventional religion as a silencing of lost voices is sounded again and again throughout the remainder of his career as a writer and thinker.

This is an Inside-Out class: half the students (“inside” students) will be prison inmates and the other half will be University students (“outside” students).

UO
prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, national or ethnic origin, age,
religion, marital status, disability, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity,
and gender expression in all programs, activities and employment practices as required by
Title IX, other applicable laws, and policies. Retaliation is prohibited by
UO policy. Questions may be referred to the
Title IX Coordinator, Office of Investigations and Civil Rights Compliance, or to the Office
for Civil Rights. Contact information, related policies, and complaint procedures are listed
on the
statement of non-discrimination.